I’m almost ready to go back to a bound teacher’s planner. I’ve been relying on an Excel based planner/scheduler. One of the reasons is that my memory stick doesn’t work in a few rooms so I loose access to Excel. The other is that I don’t evaluate as freely (the next teacher is coming in and rushing me off the machine).
I miss having a single book where I write everything down that needs to be rememebered. The excel planner doesn’t fullfill that need. What it is good at though is giving an overview of what was/willl be taught for each class. I’ll probably end up maintaining 2 systems for a bit (suck it and see) bummer.
I wrote about this before a the begining of term.
My school Planner has already fallen to bits, despite me hardly using it. Anyway with 3 days on one page its not enough paper for me.
I’m coming round to that way of thinking as well recently and for the same reason. However, I still have some hope fo the completely electronic planing system because of mobile computing. If I get a good workable solution in my Palm or a Windows mobile device I will use it and it´s always there at the touch of a button (well, 2 second bootup time). Also you can store stuff like kids’ historic data etc there just in case you’re curious and you don’t want to waste 10 minutes finding a machine with SIMS and logging on.
Anyway, if you need to revert back to the old manual model, you can print the stuff off and stick it in your markbook.
Would love to hear from anyone else that has another format for planning, marking and general tracking of students
I have my historic data printed off in my teaching file, thats where I keep my seating plan and student photos too. Much quicker than SIMS.
I write in my planner the kids that were absent. I take a register into my Excel mark book. If I have time (about 3 minutes) I will put that register data into SIMS. But thats 5% of my teaching time and sometimes I just can’t fit it in – despite it being semi compulsory.